A Hunting we will go... I guess the year was 1963 or so and me - TopicsExpress

A Hunting we will go... I guess the year was 1963 or so and me and my best bud George Labove had been dreading the beginning of winter. We managed to make the change from Cameron elementary to South Cameron High School relatively painlessly...We had spent the summer shooting pool, swimming in the river and stayed so busy we hardly had time to do much else. One of our first PE classes the coaches got teed off and made us run a mile, just for the fun of it. Well shoot Ole George took off like a deer being chased by dogs he lapped the whole group at the ½ mile mark, stopped and smoked a cigarette and still beat everyone by ¼ mile. The coaches immediately tried to recruit him to run track for South Cameron because if he had not stopped to smoke a cigarette and tell a few jokes he would have broken the school record for the mile. Well ole George was listening pretty good until they mentioned that he had to run 10 miles every day and also quit smoking after that he was having none of that. On the same day we all ran 50 yard dashes and Willard Pruitt jumped up and volunteered to run first against one of the seniors. He ran a 5.7 second 50 yd. dash barefooted and had the fastest time of anyone in the school. He later confessed that he had hid a half pint of Jack Daniels hid out at the other end of the track and he wanted to get there before someone found it. Like George he said thanks but no thanks to the track team or any other sports for that matter. I will never forget Coach Enos Derbonne looking at all of us gangly misfits and turning to the coaches and saying. We gonna have a rough few seasons cause we sure got the sorriest bunch of “Feather Merchants” that I have ever seen. Having heard this I looked around at all of us and had to admit that we didn’t look like much but each and every one of us that year had talents that were yet undiscovered. But other than the school bus bullies the translation went pretty smoothly. They hung George out the window and held him by his feet for about 20 minutes one day on the way to school. Mr. Burton Labove our bus driver finally saw what was happening and stopped the bus. He stood up and told them to “stop all that tussling” and then warned George that he had better not have scratched his new paint job or there would be hell to pay. All of us Cameronites had to make friends or fight all the boys from Creole and Grand Chenier ….shoot you would have thought we were Yankees the way they treated us for the first few days. Paul Labove made the mistake the first day of pickling a fight with Willard Pruitt. Willard was and probably is one of the nicest, gentlest, people you will ever meet. Laid back, always quick to smile and a true friend. But he also loved a good fight. Willard had just moved back from Sulphur and was fresh out of the Golden Gloves where he excelled at boxing. Willard was born with blond, kinky hair and Paul made a huge mistake and called him a blond nigger …. Well shoot, Willard hit him with so many left jabs that he had Paul begging for a right cross. After that little exhibition, all the boys that were not from Cameron decided based on that little fight that it was best if we were all friends. I did my best to make sure that a rumor spread that all us boys from the big city of Cameron all had boxing lessons and that Willard was the weakest one of the bunch. Although the truth to the matter was the closest I had come to boxing was boxing up groceries at Cameron food mart. Back to my story before I get way off track when I seem to do more and more of these days. One Friday we caught the bus as usual and when we got to school we could see people carrying guns, boxes of shotgun shells, hunting gear etc. etc. I told George that it looked like we were going to be doing something different for P.E. He just kinda grinned and remarked that he hoped were were the shooters and not the shootee’s. I just thought out loud that a shotgun sure trumps boxing lessons so I was glad we had made a lot of new friends. Well come to find out it was opening day of duck season the next day and about ½ of the student body including a few girls we going to spend the night at some ones house to go hunting the next morning. The first girl I saw with a shotgun gave me the chills cause between the rat tail combs and the 3 gallon size can of hair spray they used I figured the gun was a little much. In fact I knew a few that could have knocked a whole flight of ducks out of the air by just giving them that “Icy Stare”. Well, once we found that out me and George quickly decided that we needed to go hunting. The only problem was that we had not discussed this with our families. We had a couple of guns around the house that I would shoot from time to time. I asked George if he had a gun and he said he thought so cause Doray had mentioned it a couple of times. So the plan was on, now given the reputation that George and I had for getting into situations albeit almost never our fault we decided to approach my dad first cause he had been home all day and was surely gonna be drinking beer by the time we got home from school. Our excitement built all day long as we planned our first duck hunt ever. Then getting ahead of ourselves by planning what to do with all the ducks we were going to kill. We caught dad in a good mood and said he said yes and although he was a little glassy eyed I figured he was sober enough to remember and if not I had a witness. Although like Doray said you can’t believe a thing them boys tell you cause one will lie and the other will swear to it. Well shoot that is what friends do or at least that is the way we thought back in 1962. Doray was not as easily convinced and was sure that we were lying about my dad giving us permission so we all walked back to my house. Dad served Doray a cold Falstaff and they went to discussing our future as hunters but in French... Did you give your boy permission to go hunting? He asked. Yep, said dad right on cue. Are you crazy? Said Doray. Don’t you remember what they did with the sling shots?? Or what about the BB gun wars?? Dad kinda thought for a minute and looked me up and down before saying...Yall cannot hunt with anyone else just you two alone. Then he looked at Doray and said at least that will stop them from killing anyone else. Doray kinda smiled and said does yours eat much. EAT!! Dad answered… That boy could eat the ass off a bull at a dead run. How about yours? Well said Doray. He can eat 10 or 12 times a day and never gain an ounce. He told George to stand sideways and stick his tongue out and said in French. Look Dolze he looks just like a zipper. They all had a good laugh and I debated as to whether to translate the conversation to George but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings although I have to admit he kinda did look like a zipper standing sideways and sticking his tongue out so I left that part out. We were all set to go so we dug dads guns out and found that only one would shoot. And to top it off we did not have any shells to test it with. I went in my yard cutting money stash and pulled out 3.00 of my hard earned cash. Dad was drinking but not drunk enough to hit him up for cash. Meanwhile George was asking Doray where his shotgun was. Doray said it was in the attic cause he put it there during the great BB gun wars of 1960. Me and George headed home with Doray and as he unlocked the lock on the attic door I could see Mrs. Pearline just shaking her head from side to side and in fact if memory serves she also had a rosary in her hand. George got the honors to climb in the attic and the search was on for the shotgun. I heard George yell with excitement that he had found something. Is it a double barrel shotgun asked George? Yea Buddy said Doray that’s old Bessie. I could hear George grunting and in a moment I knew why. I didn’t think that shotgun would ever stop coming out of the attic…it was just slightly shorter than Dora’s 56 Cadillac and just about as heavy. We took turns carrying it to my house to get it cleaned up and ready to shoot. Before we left Doray told George to never put more than one shell in it at a time. While George was cleaning his gun I headed over to Western Auto for a box of shotgun shells. The limit was 4 ducks so I figured all I needed was 8 shells and a couple to practice with but they only sold them in boxes of 25 so I was sure it would last us the whole season. When I got back home George was putting his gun back together. I headed for the back yard which was really a marsh and set up a couple of targets. I loaded 3 shells in my Remington automatic and aimed at one of the targets. I shot and the target flew in the air and I tried to shoot it there but my gun misfired and when I looked down the empty shell was hung up in the mechanism. I called for my dad and he came around the house to give me the bad news that I had a one shot automatic. I was a little upset at that and told George that it looked like we both had one shot shotguns. He said shoot, he had a double barrel and he was sure Doray just didn’t want him to have fun and proceeded to load both barrels with shells. Now that doggone gun was so long and heavy that George could not hold it straight out and either had to shoot when he was lifting the gun or when the gun started back down. It had rained that day so the yard was muddy as George lined up “Old Bessie”. He made a couple of dry runs and then lifted it and when it started down he fired old Bessie. Well shoot it looked like an Elmer Fudd cartoon. His hunting cap and his glasses were suspended in midair and him and old Bessie went into an ass over teakettle roll which did not stop until he went under the side of the house. Me and dad were laughing so hard that I could barely pick up his glasses and his hat and help him out from under the side of the house where he was lying there just whimpering. I asked what the hell happened and my dad was the first to answer that he thought that both barrels had gone off at once. George was complaining it made him blind until I slipped his glasses back on his face and finally stood him up. He asked what happened and by that time dad had drug ole Bessie out from under the house and had opened the breech. Sure enough it had fired both barrels. We spent the whole night planning on how many ducks and geese we would kill cause even though the limit was only 4 ducks a piece we were going to bring the entire box of shot gun shells. We started walking towards the courthouse at about 4 am and by the time we got to the back ridge it was close to 5 am. WE didn’t really have a place to hunt so we just figured that we would walk until we saw ducks or geese and then just go shoot them. It was breaking day and we were about ¼ of a mile from the gas plant when we saw them. A whole bunch of geese all gathered up about ½ mile from the shell road we were walking on. Now George was older and told me what we had to do was to get on our hands and knees and crawl on our bellies just like John Wayne did in his movies when he was headed out to kill a bunch of Indians We started crawling from the shell road and when we got within a few hundred yds. we got down on our bellies. Dam mosquitos were eating us alive and we had mud coming out of our ears. I am pretty sure we made enough noise to drown out the sound of the gas processing plant, but low and behold although we could see the geese moving they had not flown away. The closer we crawled, the more excited we became. George made the comment that we would probably kill 50 or 60 with just one shot so then we started to plan on how we would divide the geese and how would we carry them out. Boy, this hunting thing was a lot of fun George was constantly commenting on the number of ducks that were flying but I never saw any. Then he said they were as thick as mosquitos. Then it hit me ……I said George you need to clean your glasses …that is mosquitos you are seeing…..so we giggled about that for a while I said come on Mr. Mcgoo lets kill some geese…..By this time we were within 50 yds. of them and so we were like 2 snakes wriggling in the mud , trying to get closer . We could see their heads moving thru the salt grass but as yet none had started to fly….. We finally decided we were close enough and we each picked our own angle to shoot, It was just breaking day when we fired our first shot and you could see the heads almost come to pieces and we mowed them down…..Still none flew so George said ….must be some stupid geese ..Let’s reload and shoot again. So we did. We were slapping each other on the back and left our guns so we could pick up the geese. I could see something was not right. We had killed about 21 “GEESE DECOYS”. We were giggling and running back for our guns and decided that whomever those decoys belonged to probably would not find it as funny as we did. Instead of taking the road we cut across the marsh and managed to make it home by about 4 pm that afternoon. But not before shooting up the entire box of shells and not killing anything. We had many hunting adventures after that and to my knowledge we never killed a single duck or goose. But we sure had some fun not killing anything. Although we almost killed some pelicans by mistake one day thinking they were geese, flying over. It turned out that those geese decoys belonged to Mr. Ray Burliegh. But we made a pact never to talk about that and to my knowledge we didn’t tell more than 50 or 60 people each. 11/11/2011 Ronnie Delcambre